BeautifulSoup counting tags without parsing deep inside them

Question

I thought about the following while writing an answer to this question.

Suppose I have a deeply nested xml file like this (but much more nested and much

Answer 1

BeautifulSoup cannot give you just a count/number of tags it found.

What you, though, can improve is: don't let BeautifulSoup go searching sections inside other sections by passing recursive=False:

len(soup.find_all("section", recursive=False))

Aside from that improvement, lxml would do the job faster:

tree.xpath('count(//section)')